11% Of Instagram Pictures Claiming To Have #Nofilter Are Lying

You have a reason to be skeptical the next time you see a picture tagged #nofilter on your Instagram feed.

According to a study from Spredfast, which was picked up by Mashable, says 11%, or about 8.6 million pictures, on Instagram with a #nofilter tag actually do have a filter.

The social media marketing company and Facebook advertising partner gathered the data from Facebook's public API, using the most recent 100,000 photos with a #nofilter tag in Instagram.

The #nofilter tag is one of the photo-sharing platform's most popular hashtags. It's used by humblebragging Instagram users to let their followers know when they post a picture without placing one of Instagram's built-in filters over it.

Of the 11% of the #nofiltered photos that were filtered, the most commonly used filter was Amaro (15%), followed by Valencia (12%) and XPro II (10%), according to Mashable.

Filter Fakers is also calling out fake #nofilter users: it's a website dedicated to posting Instagram users' fake #nofilter photos. Filter Fakers also has a "Faker Catcher" feature that lets you copy and paste any Instagram photo's URL. The tool determines if a filter was actually used on a photo, and which filter it was (the only catch: Faker Catcher only identifies Instagram's in-app filters. If the suspected picture uses another photo editing app, it won't register).

Earlier this week, Wired reported that Facebook transferred all of Instagram's 20 billion photos from Amazon's cloud computing service to Facebook's personal data center, reportedly so that Instagram could run more efficiently.